Benjamin Bricco

Nah man. I’m not gonna let this go unchecked. As a GWOT veteran I can’t. I listened to Massie drone through his articles of impeachment against Pete Hegseth and I recognized the sickness immediately. We fought under this ridiculous worldview during GWOT, and it cost us dearly. Massie is merely an acolyte of the bloodless bureaucratic religion that puts the lawyer in the center of the kill chain, treats every American use of force like a moral emergency, and somehow always finds more sympathy for the enemy being hunted than for the American sent to hunt him. His whole speech I began wondering who he actually was speaking for, and that’s not good. GWOT vets know EXACTLY where that road leads. Another approval. Another review. Another JAG opinion. Another commander afraid to make a decision because one bad headline will destroy his career faster than losing the fight ever could. We were lectured for years about “courageous restraint.” We were told that killing one enemy might create ten more. We were taught to fear our own lethality while the enemy studied our hesitation. And then we spent twenty years bleeding into the fucking sand. So spare me the sermon about how dangerous it is to remove lawyers who think their job is to become a veto point over command. Spare me the sudden reverence for process from people who watched Afghanistan collapse, watched thirteen Americans die at Abbey Gate, watched the Taliban retake Kabul, and somehow found no constitutional apocalypse worthy of impeachment then. Now the outrage is that the machine is actually being used. That commanders are expected to command. And that enemies are being treated like…. actual enemies for once. That civilian leadership is telling the bureaucracy to get the hell out of the way of lawful military action. From where I sit, the betrayal isn’t that Washington finally found some aggression for a chang. The realest betrayal is that men like Massie still think the lesson of the GWOT was that we needed more hesitation. No. WE NEEDED MORE VICTORY. And I’m done pretending those are the same thing. We’re all done with it. Massie is dead wrong here, he knows it, you know it, and I know it. Sincerely, -A seriously disgruntled GWOT vet who knows Hegseth is the cure to what ails our military here.